SYRIAN forces maintained pressure on US troops and their insurgent allies over the weekend despite Thursday’s air raid by the United States.

US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) militants and their al-Qaida-affiliated Hetesh allies launched a counteroffensive on Saturday night towards Busra in the southern province of Sweida.

Syrian troops supported by Lebanese Hezbollah guerillas, Syrian Social Nationalist Party militia and Iraqi international brigades chased the insurgents out of the province on Friday night, taking control of a large stretch of the Jordanian border for the first time in years.

On Thursday night US jets attacked Syrian troops and Iraqi anti-Isis militia advancing towards al-Tanf, the US training base for rebel fighters, along the Damascus-Baghdad road, south of Palmyra, reportedly killing six people.

On Friday US Defence Secretary James Mattis claimed the air raid had been in “self-defence,” attacking “Iranian-directed troops.”

He accused Syria’s ally Iran of “extending a war that should have been done years ago.”

On Saturday Iraqi military commander Shakir Abid said a unit of Norwegian special forces had been allowed through the al-Waleed crossing opposite al-Tanf to link up with US and British troops there.

The US and British troops are supporting an offensive by the FSA to seize the eastern province of Deir Ezzor before the Syrian army succeeds in relieving the provincial capital — besieged by Isis for four years — and secures the border with Iraq.

On the same day health authorities in Deir Ezzor reported that 15 civilians had been killed in the previous 24 hours by Isis shelling, part of a major assault in the death cult’s latest bid to seize the city.

The attack was defeated by the city’s defenders, who launched counterattacks yesterday aimed at breaking through Isis lines to reach government troops surrounded at the airport.

Isis cut off the city’s lifeline last year, taking advantage of a sustained air assault by US-led coalition aircraft on army positions on Thardeh mountain, which dominates the airport.

Elsewhere the 12th and last batch of 459 militants was evacuated the al-Waer suburb of Homs city yesterday for Jarabulus on the Turkish border.

Meanwhile 2,672 people, including 1,076 gunmen, left the Damascus suburb of Barzeh in the third evacuation to extremist-occupied Idlib province.